My first exposure as a small business owner to event marketing was through the two Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries my wife and I owned back in the late 1990′s. In case you aren’t familiar with his work, Thomas Kinkade is known as “The Painter of Light”, due to the exquisite use of light in his paintings. At the time, he was one of the most popular artists of our time. We had two galleries in high-traffic malls here in Texas where we live.
About twice a year, we held special “highlighting events’, where a Master Highlighter trained by Thomas Kinkade himself would visit the gallery for a few days and highlight the limited edition canvas lithographs. There were a limited number of time slots available, and they always sold out. As you might imagine, this created scarcity and gave customers a reason to buy paintings now vs. procrastinating, delaying or waiting until later. I remember being amazed at how much a deadline and limited-time extra bonus (the highlighting) made in our sales volume.
Fast forward to 2008, and the beginning of one of the deepest recessions of my lifetime. Since 2004, I have owned an online poker training business, selling software tools, e-books and training videos to the Texas Hold’em poker marketplace. In fact, this particular business is what caused me to take a serious interest in online marketing in the first place. Every year since its inception, this business turned a generous profit – enough for me to live comfortably on each month, after paying all business expenses.
In February of 2008, I launched a new membership site, where poker players have access to a huge library of training videos on everything poker-related, a private members-only forum and what we call the “Poker Underground”, a place where selected pros share information with our members. I launched this new membership site and it took off immediately, doing extremely well and growing like crazy.
By September 2008, the news was filled with the Wall Street and housing meltdown and the cloud of impending economic doom began to loom over everyone and everything. Well, you’ve been here, you know the rest of that part of this story. By October, sales of my software, e-book and affiliate products had all but ceased – maybe a couple of hundred dollars total (down from many thousands per month just a few months earlier). This was a bit like having the financial rug jerked out from underneath my business.
Next, the members started cancelling their monthly subscriptions, and many didn’t even bother cancelling – their credit cards just started being declined. Needless to say, like many small business people, I was extremely worried and knew that if I didn’t do something fast, my business would soon be gone. After some necessary cost reductions and contract renegotiations, there was nothing left to cut without killing the business.
At this point, I was becoming desperate. I realized I had to do something or this business I had invested so much time and money into was going to fail. Fortunately for me, I had invested more than $45,000 on every kind of Internet Marketing course and seminar I could get my hands on between 2005 and 2008, and was adequately prepared with the knowledge for what needed to be done next.
Thanksgiving was just around the corner, so I decided to create a campaign to coincide with the holiday. I created what we now call a “7-14 Day Holiday Campaign” around the 2008 Thanksgiving holiday. I structured this campaign like a “mini-launch”, where I mentioned a couple of weeks ahead of the campaign that a sale was coming soon, without any details. Then, I structured a sequence of emails that formally announced the sale, the details and some compelling, time-limited and quantity-limited bonuses that were available during the sale only.
I launched this campaign the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. By December 3rd the campaign was over, and I had replenished my bank account back up to around $18,000 and acquired several hundred additional monthly subscription members, which restored our ongoing monthly revenues to a safe level again. It also made for a very nice Christmas for my family.
Unfortunately, another wave of economic impacts rippled through in early 2009, causing an even larger defection of paying members, putting us right back on the edge of the financial abyss again by February. About that same time, I noticed a lot of the top marketers were starting to give away their high-end products just to get the monthly subscription signups. This gave me another idea.
What about evolving the Holiday Campaign into a $1 trial campaign to drive monthly memberships? So I modified the campaign and landing page to promote a $1 trial membership offer, and brought in hundreds of new members and restored our monthly revenue base once again.
During 2009, we have run several of these trial campaigns, which has kept my poker business afloat and healthy. The second one was a 7-day free trial, which was also very successful.
Then one day my partner, Jeff Sulma, and I were sitting on the balcony at my lake house (the fishing wasn’t very good that day), discussing how great these campaigns had worked and I said, “You know, Jeff, there must be a lot of other small business folks out there who need to run these kinds of campaigns right now. I don’t know what I would’ve done with the poker business during this recession without them. What do you think about packaging these campaigns I’ve been using up into like a do-it-yourself kit or something and making them available to help other small business owners out?”
Jeff said he thought it was a great idea, but that we should go a step further. Some small business owners might lack the time or copy writing expertise, so we should also offer some “packaged consulting” services for a fixed-fee for those folks, which would likely improve their results. So I handed over eight different campaign sequences that I’d been using in the poker business to Jeff, an experienced copywriter and marketer. Jeff analyzed all the campaigns and then created what is now the “DIY” email campaign products.
So, that’s how the WinningWare DIY and packaged service campaigns came into being. Along the way, we also realized how much time it takes for small businesses to create pre-launch and launch sequences for proper Internet-based launches, so we decided to add those to the product line while we were at it. It took months of development to turn my campaigns into something more generic and a “process” that can be applied to any business.
Guess what’s on my calendar to do next week in my poker training business?
Spend an hour or so updating my landing page and queue up my Thanksgiving Sale offer for 2009 once again and then relax through the Holidays.
Boy – 2009 has been quite a tough year. I’m hopeful 2010 will bring with it some economic recovery that will make it easier going for everyone.
Learn more about these email campaigns
Tags: bonus, discount, emakl marketing, free trial, holiday campaign, offer, recession, sale, special offerRelated posts:
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